Best Kills
Since one of the plot threads in Bruce Malmuth's Hard to Kill involves Seagal avenging his wife's murder, he has to run into her killer sooner or later. Fortunately, Seagal just happens to be holding a broken pool cue when this meeting takes place. Feeling somewhat angry, Seagal jabs the splintered cue into the man's chest by way of his fucking neck and explains, "That's for my wife. Fuck you and die." Then, he kicks the dude in the face.
When the time comes to take down Marked for Death's funny-named Jamaican drug lord, Screwface (Basil Wallace), Seagal does not fuck around. No, first, he CHOPS HIM IN THE DICK WITH A FUCKING SWORD, then he cuts his head off, and then he shows the severed head to all of Screwface's buddies so they know for sure that he's seriously fucking dead. This does not do the trick. See, Screwface has an identical twin brother he never told anyone about, so Seagal has to kill him all over again. (on Cracked: 10 Scenes of Brutal Violence Guaranteed to Make You Laugh) Obviously annoyed by this point, Seagal takes out Screwface's eyes, throws him through a wall, breaks his back, and throws the now-paralysed man down an elevator shaft. The poor, blind, crippled bastard lands on some piece of metal down there and gratefully accepts the warm embrace of death as he is fucking impaled.
When Seagal goes Out for Justice in the John Flynn film of the same name, that means he's ready for all kinds of wonderfully horrific violence, including pinning one dude's hand to a wall with a meat cleaver and messily blowing off another dude's leg with a shotgun. So, when crazy crackhead villain Richie Madano (William Forsythe) tries to attack Seagal with a corkscrew, you know you're in for something special. And you're right. That corkscrew goes right into Richie's fucking skull like he was a bottle of cheap wine. (on Cracked: The 5 Biggest Mismatches in Movie Fight History)
When you think of the ultimate martial arts pairings in film, Steven Seagal vs. Tommy Lee Jones probably isn't the first one that comes to mind. To be fair, though, Jones' crazed ex-CIA character in Andrew Davis' Under Siege puts up more of a fight than most Seagal villains. Actually, their little knife fight is pretty cool, and it gets even cooler when Seagal buries his knife in the top of Jones' head and then shoves that same head through a computer monitor, you know, just to add insult to death.
In On Deadly Ground, the most outrageous death is reserved for some nameless guard, but whoever that guy is, he will forever be immortalized as the dude who gets stabbed in the eye with a hunting knife and then has his face shoved into a wall so hard that the blade comes out the back of his goddamn head.
It's not surprising for an action movie villain to fall off of something and then land on something else that ends up impaling him. It's sort of a genre cliché. However, Donald (John M. Jackson) the copycat serial killer/hitman (he killed Seagal's ex-wife and then crucified the corpse) in John Gray's The Glimmer Man goes the extra mile by picking a particularly interesting way of being impaled. After a short fight, Seagal apparently gets bored and just casually shoves this guy through a window. Donald then lands on the spikes of a wrought-iron fence, one spike under his chin and one through each of his wrists, in what may be cinema's first accidental crucifixion.
In the big samurai swordfight climax of Into the Sun (directed by a man who calls himself mink), Seagal just happens to spot the cowboy-hat-wearing yakuza who killed his fiancée. In Japanese, Seagal says to the dude, "I shall beat you to death." And then he does. Specifically, he hits that dude in the head with his sword until the dude fucking dies.
Michael Keusch's Shadow Man might not be one of Seagal's better-known, better-liked, or better-made movies, but it does bear the distinction of being the only movie where he hits a dude in the chest so hard that blood leaks out the dude's back. See, in this movie, Seagal plays a master of something called dim mak, and he demonstrates this technique early in the film by hitting a watermellon in such a way as to make it explode from the inside out. Then, closer to the end of the film, he uses the same technique on one of the movie's villains. Needless to say, it kills the living shit out of that guy.
When Seagal catches up with the villain of Roel Reiné's Pistol Whipped (Mark Elliot Wilson), who happens to be his best friend and the new husband of his ex-wife, he isn't going to be satisfied with just shooting the guy. No, first Seagal asks his old friend whether he would like to be buried or cremated (answer: buried), then he kills the dude, then he stuffs the dude's corpse into the nearest car, and then he blows up the fucking car. It's a special kind of mean when you make a point of finding out what a guy's funeral wishes are just so you can disrespect them.
